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James Webb Space Telescope helps detect the most distant Fast Radio Burst ever seen — and scientists are surprised by its source
"This is an extraordinary glimpse into the distant universe."
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Astronomers have discovered the most distant Fast Radio Burst (FRB) ever detected. Not only could this help untangle the mystery of what causes these powerful but brief explosions of radio waves, but because FRBs are incredible celestial messengers, it could also reveal details of 11 billion years of cosmic evolution. This FRB, designated FRB 20240304B, was first observed by astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. Then, using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers tracked it back to its home galaxy, located around 11 billion light-years away. This revealed that FRB 20240304B has been travelling to Earth since the universe was just 3 billion years old or so.
That doesn't just make this FRB 20240304B the most distant and earliest FRB ever detected; it more than doubles the distance of the previous record holder!
"This is an extraordinary glimpse into the distant universe," team co-leader Manisha Caleb from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy said in a statement sent to Space.com. "We have caught a fast radio burst from a time when the universe was only about three billion years old, and we have used that brief flash of radio light to learn about the matter it has travelled through over billions of years."
The team's research was published on Thursday (Oct. 8) in the journal Science.
Fast Radio Bursts are mysterious blasts of radio waves that usually flare just once, and in the mere milliseconds they last, emit many times more energy than the sun can radiate in a year.
As these powerful millisecond-long blasts of radio waves travel billions of light-years to reach Earth, they pass through gas and dust in galaxies and through the "cosmic fog" lying between these galaxies, the so-called intergalactic medium. By measuring how much the signal slows down, scientists can effectively weigh this fog of gas to map the distribution of matter in galaxies.
That makes them crucial tools for understanding how galaxies use gas and dust to form stars and grow. Thus, FRBs are a metaphorical cosmic 'fossil record' blasting through space at light speed with the energy of a multitude of stars.
With that in mind, it is little wonder that as a record-breaking example of a fast radio burst, FRB 20240304B has already shocked astronomers. It did this by delivering a surprise about its home galaxy.